A Case Study Of To Live From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

The great cultural strategy of Chinese literature "Going-out" is of great significance for the realization of culture dream of China.There is no doubt that translation is an effective channel to introduce Chinese great literary works abroad and enter the international stage.Up to now,there have been a lot of translation theories can be used to guide literary translation.Among them,skopostheorie that emerged in Germany in the early 1970 s provides a complete new perspective for literary translation.Skopostheorie believes that skopos of translation decides methods adopted by the translator.Since it was introduced into China,a number of related studies have been conducted,most of which focus on translation of non-literary text instead of literary text.Therefore,this paper intends to further enrich the related studies.A case study of To Live is conducted from the perspective of skopostheorie,which was written by Yu Hua,a contemporary avant-garde novelist of China.Firstly,with the adoption of literature methodology,the author intends to figure out skopos of the target text from aspects of translator’s motivation and target readers’ expectations.Secondly,bilingual corpus analysis is employed to contrast and analyze how the translator realizes the skopos at linguistic and cross-cultural levels based on skopos rule;what translation methods are adopted by the translator to make the target text coherent and accepted to conform to the target readers’ reading habits based on coherence rule;faithfulness between the target and source text is discussed from aspects of unique language style,narrative point of view,character depiction,theme and artistic features based on fidelity rule.At last,the analysis of related data including sales ranking,star rating,average readers’ review,editorial and foreign media’s comments from Amazon website is presented to study the situation of introduction and reception of To Live abroad.The study shows that:(1)In order to reproduce a uniquely Chinese and very touching description of what life is really like in rural China in an era marred by political turmoil,internal strife and natural disasters as well as Chinese philosophy of survival conveyed,Berry adopts foreignization to retain the exotic language and cultural elements to meet the target readers’ expectations and demands.(2)Firstly,at linguistic level,specific translation methods including literal and free translation are adopted based on skopos rule to realize the skopos of reproducing unique language style such as colloquialism,rhetoric methodsand euphemism in the target text;At cross-cultural communicative level,specific translation methods including literal,free translation,paraphrase as well as annotation including literal plus annotation and transliteration plus annotation are employed based on skopos rule to realize the skopos of preserving cultural and historical-specific expressions as well as Chinese ideology in the target text;Secondly,considering the great differences between Chinese and English,Berry adopts various translation methods such as addition,omission,edition,combination,deduction and adaptation to make the target text coherent and accepted for target readers based on coherence rule.Thirdly,it can be seen that the target text is faithful to the source text in aspects of unique language style,narrative point of view,character depiction,theme and artistic features based on fidelity rule.(3)According to the data analysis of Amazon website,it can be drawn that English version To Live enjoys great popularity and recognition among target readers.So it is testified that skopos of the translation is well realized,thus transmitting Chinese culture and fulfilling cross-cultural communication.In addition,the applicability of skopostheorie in literary translation is further verified.Based on the above research results,some suggestions are given by the author to guide literary translation practice,thus promoting the great cultural strategy of "Going-out" of Chinese literature.